CGU Insurance

"We want to be pioneers when it comes to marketing and sales technology. Salesforce is helping us support our Brokers & Agents retain clients and stay ahead of the competition."

-Grant Pattison
Senior Manager, Marketing & Sales Technology

CGU Insurance, seeing it through

Australian Company CGU Insurance thinks about the future all the time, which is why it’s offered insurance to commercial, rural and individual clients, large and small, since 1851.

“We’re very much a community-focused company,” says Grant Pattison, Senior Manager, Marketing and Sales Technology at CGU. “In all of our business endeavours, we’re guided by a simple promise: we’ll see it through.”

A humble enterprise during its early days, CGU now employs over 4,000 people in 30 branches across Australia. Each year, it manages approximately 350,000 insurance claims. “Seeing it through” is their commitment and CGU is proud to pay out on average, 98% of claims which total $1.6 billion.

True to its community focus, CGU wanted to ensure its customers received a personalised experience that made them feel valued and understood.

To make sure it met customer expectations, CGU realised it needed to bring its data together, streamline its internal processes and generate more accurate forecasts. “We’re committed to staying abreast of new technologies and evolving with customer expectations,” says Pattison.

Salesforce Service Cloud provides CGU partners and employees with access to real-time information about ongoing deals. Business development managers are able to analyse current performance and determine whether individual brokers and agents have enough opportunities to meet their monthly targets.

Since adopting Service Cloud, CGU has seen a 5–10% increase in the number of electronic quotes that are converted into written policies.

Salesforce has enabled CGU to coordinate their approach to returning customers via Chatter. This enterprise social network allows partners and underwriters to construct appealing packages for clients by communicating rapidly in real time in the Salesforce Partner Community.

“Chatter encourages our employees to act as a team in retaining customers,” says Pattison. CGU’s new approach has led to a 0.5–1% increase in its annual renewal rate.

CGU has many clients in rural Australia, including the owners of more than 60,000 farms and hobby farms. Previously, it would have been necessary for an underwriter visit each farm in person, assess relevant assets and generate a risk profile. The process costs approximately $300–$400 per farm.

But that’s no longer necessary. Property owners can now photograph their assets using a mobile app built on the Salesforce Lightning Platform. They can then upload them to the cloud to streamline the underwriting and risk assessment process. Each photo is matched with its GPS location and automatically linked to the relevant customer account.

The Customer Community lets customers make basic changes to their policies and access other self-service features. They also now receive packages tailored to their needs, thanks to Marketing Cloud’s tools for analysing customer information.

“We’re currently building one-to-one personalisation campaigns for our customers,” says Pattison. “We want customers to know that we care about them as individuals with specific interests.”

Customers are now closer than ever to the company and as a result of its efforts; CGU was recognised by Fifth Quadrant Consulting for offering the best customer experience of the year.

“We want to be pioneers when it comes to sales & marketing technology,” says Pattison. “As we pursue this goal, Salesforce is helping us support our Brokers & Agents retain clients and stay ahead of the competition.”